Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud

When most critics were using Freudian theories to study literature, Mark Edmundson read Freud's writings *as* literature alongside the works of poets grappling with the heady issues of desire, narcissism, and grief. *Towards Reading Freud* weighs the psychoanalyst's therapeutic directives against his more visionary impulses in a magisterial comparative study of such writers as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Keats. Cross-fertilizing psychological doctrine with the literary canon, this richly informed volume forges a new understanding of Freud's writings on the self. "Marvelous. . . . Edmundson's book offers an extraordinary challenge both to practicing analysts and to a scholarly community which all too uncomplainingly inhabits and reinforces the Freudian paradigm of interpretation. Edmundson reinvents an adventurous and dissident Freud as an antidote to . . . weary psychoanalytic commonplaces."-Malcolm Bowie, *Raritan* "This book takes a distinguished place in the ongoing effort to recontextualize Freud by stressing the literary, rather than the scientific roots and character of his theory."-*Virginia Quarterly Review*